don't cry (mercy)
by mountain-ash and rusted iron
Summary: Rick and Daryl, at the end.


Dead leaves crunched underfoot and bird calls sang out from the trees. Rick breathed in the earthy scent of the woods, and paused. Something was off. He turned.

Light fell through the canopy, illuminating the man limping towards her. He looked like a businessman, charcoal-grey suit, short dark hair and silver-rimmed glasses. He reached out a hand towards Rick, and he watched the other man's lips move, struggling to make out any words.

The clouds broke apart, and the light shifted. Rick could see what had made him uneasy. Half of the man's face was rotting off - there was a gaping hole in his cheek, and his flesh was a sickly grey shade. The cloying scent of death hung in the air around him. Rick could see maggots crawling in the man's neck and his suit was a mess, torn and spattered with blood.

The man in front of her was dead.

The dead man took a step, the scrape-drag of his leg disrupting the peace of the woods. Great, he was aiming for Rick. Couldn't the damn walker have gone for a nice squirrel or something?

Rick let out an almost inaudible sigh and hooked his finger through the loop of his machete. Shhhshk-draaaagg. The dead man continued his limping approach.  
Rick circled carefully around the walking corpse. Pulled his machete out in a practiced motion. Stepped closer. Another step, dodging the walker's grasping hands. He shifted his grip and swung at the man's neck.

Ziiiiiiiiiiing.  
A crossbow bolt hummed through the air and buried itself in the dead man's eyeball. He dropped without a sound. Rick looked down at the body crumpled in the leaf litter, a marionette with its strings cut.

"Really?" he sighed, "I was handling it."

A low voice came from the trees, "Aw, but I couldn't just let you have all the fun, darling."

"Sure, sweetheart," Rick drawled, smiling despite his words.

He loved Daryl, even when the other man was being irritating. They'd been through hell together, and come out the other side. Rick trusted Daryl, his partner, with his life.

And, well, it wasn't like there was anyone else.  
It was just Rick and Daryl now.

He didn't know if the others were still alive - they'd been split off from them by a landslide, a while back. After Rick and Daryl had dug themselves out, there'd been a storm, a week of heavy rain pinning them down. And then, before they could attempt to circle around and track down their family, the horde of walkers came, pushing them off course.

Fuck, he missed his family.

"Hey, you in there, Rick?"

Daryl was in front of him, kneeling on the forest floor to search the body, and looking up at Rick with concern in his eyes.

Rick shook himself out of his own head and grunted an affirmative.  
He'd been drifting a lot lately, and it was gonna get him killed if he didn't get his act together.

"Alright. This one ain't got anything useful, just this," Daryl held up a now-defunct phone and a plain leather wallet. Fuck. Daryl's expression reflected Rick's own thoughts.

They were running low on supplies. Food, water, blankets, everything. Even Daryl's hunting couldn't feed them when there were so few animals to kill, and they couldn't live on only meat. The human body needed fibre and nutrients and complex carbohydrates. Fruits and vegetables and grains, not a roast squirrel diet.  
The new squirrel-only diet! Lose weight in weeks. Try it today! Rick chuckled bitterly to himself.

What he wouldn't give to go back to before it all began. Back to those stupid weight-loss programmes advertised on tv, and bright red cans of Coca-Cola, and a million identical products in different branded packaging.  
Detaining drunk teens on late summer nights, mosquitos humming outside, asphalt melting in the heat. Back to paperwork and traffic jams and working out at the gym and packing his kid off to school. Back to before the outbreak.

Rick and Daryl kept moving, kept walking. Food was scarce in these woods, but the maps said there was a small mountain town nearby. Hopefully there'd be something there. Rick hadn't eaten a full meal in days and he was feeling grey and shaky. Black spots fuzzed his vision when he moved too fast, and his stomach was cramping painfully.

And then they stumbled down the mountainside and Rick knew he'd never find out if there was any food in the town, or anything useful at all.

The path ahead was obliterated, the narrow goat track washed out by flooding. The rest of the mountainside was sheer, almost vertical, while loose stones threatened to tumble down and crush anyone straying from the path.

They would die here.

The horde of walkers, the one that had originally forced them away from a path back to the group, was catching up. They'd been following Rick and Daryl for weeks, no more than a day behind, always hungry, always there.  
The man in the suit had been but one of many, and now they were trapped. They couldn't keep moving, and the hungry dead would catch up soon.

The route they'd come down was dangerous enough in the daylight, and night was falling fast. Fuck, Daryl and Rick probably couldn't even make it back up safely under the bright midday sun - they were exhausted and starving, limbs shaky and reactions slow. They would've fallen quickly on the treacherous path, and that would be the end.

But nevermind hypotheticals - the pair were trapped. Nowhere to go and a horde of undead at their backs. Death was coming.

Rick watched the first few walkers trip and tumble down the slope. A handful fell, smashed their skulls in on the rocks, but most survived. And more dead kept coming.

He and Daryl nodded at each other and prepared to fight. With all the time spent together, they didn't need words. They communicated with half sentences and hand gestures and minute shifts of body language.  
Here? No, there.  
Duck!  
Safe.  
Behind you!  
Over here.

They fought until they couldn't. Rick lost his machete to a frenzied group of dead college students. The last bolt from Daryl's crossbow found its home in the eye socket of a cheer captain as it lunged towards him. Rick's last knife was pulled from his hands by a dead office worker, hungry for flesh. Daryl's only hatchet was buried in the skull of a stumbling farmhand.

Rick couldn't fight any longer. The hands of the dead dragged him down, ragged nails catching on her skin, the thick scent of rot clouding her senses.  
Rick turned, desperate for one last look at his partner.

I love you. I love you too.

Teeth tore the flesh from his bones, and the light faded.


End file.
